Infermedica, the Poland-founded health tech startup that offers an AI-driven platform for preliminary diagnosis and triage, has raised just over $10 million in Series A funding.
The round is led by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and digital health fund Heal Capital. Existing investors Karma Ventures, Inovo Venture Partners, and Dreamit Ventures also participated.
Infermedica says the investment will be used for platform R&D to further enhance its patient triage and symptom checking features and clinical decision support analysis. The company is also planning to expand operations in Germany and the U.S. The new capital means the startup has raised $15 million in total to date.
Founded in 2012 in Wrocław by CEO Piotr Orzechowski, Infermedica describes itself an “AI-driven, customisable, multi-language” platform that aids patient care and healthcare service delivery. Like a plethora of competitors, such as Ada Health, Babylon and Your.MD, it combines the expertise of doctors with its own algorithms to offer symptom triage and advice to patients.
Image Credits: Infermedica
Notably, the company operates a B2B model, working with insurance companies, telemedicine companies, and health systems that want to offer digitally delivered symptom-checks. It positions itself as “API-first,” as well as whitelabeling its platform on behalf of customers.
“We’re focused on improving the way patients make decisions about their symptoms,” explains Orzechowski. “According to studies, the majority of internet users search online when they’re feeling unwell, but it’s hard to find accurate and personalized answers about our own health. To help everyone evaluate their symptoms in a quick and reliable way, we’ve developed a carefully curated AI platform that asks diagnostic questions and computes likelihoods of primary care conditions. With nearly 40,000 hours of physician work and 6,000,000 completed user checkups, we are among the most trusted vendors of symptom checking technology”.
To that end, current Infermedica clients include health insurance companies, such as Allianz, Global Excel, and Medis, where digital triage claims to help optimise healthcare costs. The startup also sells into hospital systems, including Sana Kliniken, and is used to identify the urgency of a patient’s case and to collect information prior to a hospital visit. In addition, its API is used by technology companies, such as Microsoft’s integration of the platform into its health bot.
On competition, Orzechowski says that there are several “great companies” in the space, but argues that each of them does something different in terms of their product or marketing focus. “What makes Infermedica unique is that we are API-first,” he says. “We’re solely focused on providing the most powerful AI triage and pre-diagnosis component, and we integrate easily with all other platforms such as chatbots, patient portals, and EHRs. We want to become like Stripe, but for medical diagnosis”.
Meanwhile, Infermedica makes money by licensing its technology to its B2B clients. The startup’s SaaS model sees it charge based on the number of performed API calls or completed patient checkups.
Source: TechCrunk